According to the Washington Post, President Trump is attempting to make good on his campaign promise to “bomb the shit out of” ISIS. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have much regard for sparing anyone who may be related to or in close proximity to a suspected terrorist during a drone strike.
Sources told the Post that Trump “seemed unimpressed” when the CIA’s head of drone operations modified the process to avoid civilian casualties. During a meeting where the president was shown video of a strike where the target was far away from the home containing his family before he was taken out, one attendee of the meeting claims Trump asked, “Why did you wait?”
The meeting occurred shortly after Trump asked the CIA to start arming drones in Syria in accordance with his roll-back of Obama-era initiatives to limit the agency’s drone usage strictly to surveillance and leave bombing to the military. The military’s own statistics show that over 75 percent of the civilian casualties stemming from wars with ISIS in Iraq and Syria were incurred during the Trump administration. During the four-year conflict, 188 civilian casualties were reported prior to Trump’s inauguration. As of January, that number has since increased to 831.
Early in his candidacy, Trump explicitly promised to terrorists’ families should he become commander-in-chief.
“We’re fighting a very politically correct war,” Trump said on a December 2015 appearance on Fox & Friends. “And the other thing with the terrorists — you have to take out their families. When you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families! They care about their lives, don’t kid yourselves. They say they don’t care about their lives. But you have to take out their families.”
.@realDonaldTrump: “I’d knock the hell out of ISIS… you have to take out their families.”https://t.co/ju4LYTl0JV
— FOX & friends (@foxandfriends) December 2, 2015
A few months later, Trump softened his rhetoric a bit, telling Anderson Cooper that he didn’t necessarily want to kill relatives of terrorists, just “go after them.”
We can’t say he didn’t warn us.
